Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Thursday October 09, 2008 @11:39AM
from the so-do-i dept.

MojoKid writes "Current regulation, introduced with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) in July of 2006, primarily
sought to prevent the unnecessary use of toxic metals in batteries as well as making it easier to recycle and dispose of used batteries. The updated 'New Batteries Directive,' as
discussed in
New Electronics by Gary Nevision, would go much further. Article 11 of the
directive, as currently written, would require that devices must be made in such a way as to allow batteries, either
for replacement or at end of life for disposal to be 'readily removed.' Of course, Apple's iPhones and iPods wouldn't meet this requirement, as it stands. It's obvious that an iPhone battery replacement program could be considered a cash cow for Apple as well."

mlimber writes: The New York Times is running a story about multicore computing and the efforts of Microsoft et al. to try to switch to the new paradigm: "The challenges [of parallel programming] have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.... Engineers and computer scientists acknowledge that despite advances in recent decades, the computer industry is still lagging in its ability to write parallel programs."

LingNoi writes: Blender's project Apricot has begun work on creating the first open source commerical title scheduled for release on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. The project is being funded by the Blender and Crystal Space communities in an effort to address the problems that professionals face in the games industry with regards to using Blender 3d and Crystal Space engine.

Discussions have already begun on improvements that can be made on the blender forums.

An anonymous reader writes: Dell says you can't use your existing Microsoft Volume Licensing on its line of Open Source notebook computers. They go on to say, "Customers interested in a Microsoft® Windows® solution should purchase a Dell notebook pre-loaded with Windows XP Professional."

Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday November 06, 2007 @04:31PM
from the everybody-say-awwww dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that toddlers treat a small robot as a peer rather than a toy. A team from the University of California, San Diego, placed Sony's QRIO in a classroom of kids aged 18 months to 2 years and watched them interact. Over time the children grew to treat the robot as one of them — playing games with the robot, hugging it, and covering it up with a blanket when its batteries ran down."

Brentwood writes: It only took them 6 months, but Ars reports that Microsoft has officially released the long-awaited performance and compatability updates that have been quietly tested the last few weeks. According to Ars, the updates fix some major flaws with Vista, including the notorious slow copy bug. Hibernation fixes and big updates for nVidia cards are included, too. They won't hit Windows Update for another week, but you can grab them from Microsoft directly: the compatibility and
reliability update, the performance
and reliability update.

Lucas123 writes: "Fujitsu claims they have been able to create ideally ordered alumina nanohole patterns for isolated bit-by-bit recording on a disks, according to Computerworld's Brian Fonseca. The company recently demonstrated it could use a typical head and spinning platter to perform read/write operations on invdividual nanoholes. 'The patterned alumina nanohole media was created via a Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) processes using nano-imprint lithography (enabling discrete distance from bit to bit or track to track), anodic oxidation and cobalt electrodeposition at a density of 100-nanometer-pitch nanoholes suitable to existing head technology.'"Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: "There are two issues people need to come to grips with," BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Narvin told Slyck.com. "Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client."
As for the protocol itself, that too is closed, but is available by obtaining an SDK license.Link to Original Source

gnujoshua writes: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project request nominations for the 10th annual, 2007 Free Software Awards. Last year, the FSF awarded the developers of Sahana the Award for Project of Social Benefit for their free software disaster management system that was created in the wake of the 2004 Tsunami that devistated Southeast Asia. Also, last year, hacker Theodore Ts'o was given the Award for Advancement of Free Software for his many contributions to free software projects, including Linux, Kerberbos, and ONC RPC. More information about the awards can be found at www.fsf.org/awards. Submit your nominations by October 31, 2007.Link to Original Source

We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment.Link to Original Source

A black hole has been spotted belching out a burst of gamma rays after gulping down part of a nearby star, something never seen before. Such violent burps may actually be the most common type of explosive "gamma-ray burst" in the universe.

Astronomers led by Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech in Pasadena, US, traced the burst to a star system in our own galaxy, where a black hole and a star slightly less massive than the Sun are orbiting each other.

Observing this black hole outburst from nearby would be a risky prospect. "If you were as close to the black hole as the [companion] star, things wouldn't be pretty," Kasliwal told New Scientist. "I don't think you'd want to be near it."

thomasLNX writes: "Yes, a $200 Linux notebook is great for third world countries, but according to Matt Hartley, cheap PCs that run Linux are also great for the United States. Just because we are in the West, it doesn't mean we are ready to shell money for PCs that we can have for a very reasonable price. He continues, "Speaking on behalf of solutions for all income levels, I'm sincerely hoping to see the 3ePC, among other solutions yet to be released, being offered to first world nations. The belief that if you live in Europe or North America and you are able to afford a computer is insane, and it would be nice to see the manufacturers of these projects understand this. Some might argue that it just takes time. I, on the other hand, feel strongly that we have given the creators of alternative hardware plenty of time. Real people in our own countries need options now — today. Not 'someday.'"Link to Original Source